Apple is doing it again, leaving the door wide open: Mountain Lion

As cute as Apple’s Latest Mac OS Mountain Lion OS may seem, there is still a hidden underwhelming feeling about the whole ordeal. It seems as if Apple has lost the “OMG THIS IS CRAZY!” factor and now made a home with the “aaah, yes….I see… that’s nice” crowd. Not that anything is wrong with that, as Mac OS is by all means a fully matured product. We all know mature products see very little innovation in their climax.

The problem is a trend we have seen before. A while back I wrote a piece on how Apple left the door wide open for windows phone. The basis of the article revolved around the lack of innovation seen in the iPhone 4S, while everyone else (mainly Microsoft) was innovating at a monstrous pace. It wasn’t so much that Apple couldn’t afford to slow down, or even that they had completely stop dead in their tracks, it was all about them slowing down at all. For years on end Apple had applied the pressure relentlessly. Now that the industry had some time to adjust and play catch up, they’re doing just that, catching up!

Mac OS Mountain Lion feeds into this trend in the very same way. The only difference is, unlike the mobile market, Apple does not command the lead and cannot afford to lollygag. Given the origins of Mountain Lion’s primetime features, there isn’t too much cause for alarm. In fact, even though they’re all iOS ports, they are all very much welcome and make plenty of sense. However, given the monster that is Windows 8 and the huge amounts of innovation and risk that comes along with it, Apple’s Mountain Lion seems like yester-years news.

If you’re not familiar with what is going on in the Windows 8 camp, I suggest you take some time out and take a peek. A bold new user interface, enhanced user experience and some all new development ethics all return a large bit of excitement around the Windows 8 topic. As far as Mountain Lion goes, iOS inspired tweaks are all you get.

Granted, this is a bit different to the mobile game. I suspect Apple really doesn’t care too much about Mac OS as a stock driver. They never did or could, not since the emergence of iOS at least. I can support these claims by a quick glance at their desktop strategy which includes dumping features from their mobile platform. I say this to pose a very interesting question. Weather or not this matters to Apple is one thing, Windows 8 doing damage is a sure thing; but this brief lack in innovation and “not pushing the envelope” attitude around Mac OS is surely dangerous. Will this be the death blow for Mac OS? Will this be the killer blow that will toss Apple out of the Desktop game for good? Even better, with iOS being the power house it is, will apple even care?

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ramontrotman

What i don’t understand is why are they not refreshing the looks. It looks so 90’s, just awful.

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Murani LewisFebruary 16, 2012

Apple doesn’t feel they need to do any type of significant refreshing and sadly they are right. Their customers love Apple despite of the lack of UI design progression.

What Apple really is preparing people for is using iOS for basically all their needs thus ridding themselves of the need to push multiple product families and instead focus on delivering one seamless experience that does not include a desktop OS at all in the future.

The danderous part, as i’m sure Ramon knows, is that Microsoft is moving swiftly to deliver Windows 8 and in a sense beats Apple to the punch of removing the standard desktop from consumers lives. This fall should see the introduction of convertible PCs that will be near as light as the iPad and just as powerful if not more powerful.

This means things like the MacBook Air that seem super progressive now will be just a run of the mill device going forward. Apple is betting big that they’ll be able to convince everyone who uses iOS products to move on to iPads in the future and lock the customers into their ecosystem. If Windows 8 does what it should that could be a huge problem for Apple.

However it won’t be a death blow because Apple has way too much cash to fall easily.

You call it as service pack in the Microsoft world and service packs are free, where as Apple labels each service pack as a wild cat and sells it. AFAIK Puma and Mountain Lion are same as Cougar, Panther, Panter, Deer Tiger, American Lion etc. And Mac OSX 10.1 was labeled as Puma and now this as Mountain Lion. Naming here is not making any sense.http://home.midwest.net/~selsyn/puma.htmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X

Also Apple Fans claim Windows 7 is Service Pack of Vista, but at the same time they simply forget Snow Leopard is a Service Pack of Leopard and this Moutain Lion is going to be Service Pack of Lion. But Leopard and Lion have issues, where as Vista had issues with hardware and the free service pack 1 of Vista fixed it, only the media made it big issue without merit.